Here’s what you need to know about the new Workplace features announced at Flow
Earlier this month, we hosted Flow — Workplace’s first ever global leadership summit. The event brought senior leaders from all industries together to discuss how they can empower employees to do their best work, increase productivity, and unlock the potential of every single person in their organization. In other words, how to find Flow.
We were joined at the event by a formidable group of speakers and guests, including C-suite executives, Workplace customers, SaaS experts and industry thought leaders from all over the world. Aside from the impressive line-up, the other stars of the show were the new product features revealed at Flow.
Director of Product, Kyle McGinn, and Product Marketing Director, Christine Overby, had the fun task of announcing these new features. As Kyle explained,
“We’ve listened to what our customers have to say — what they like, what they don’t like — and we’ve thought about the features we should bring to the platform to help those customers.”
Here’s everything you need to know about Workplace’s new features, and how they’re bringing work communities closer together.
Safety Check
As the top most requested feature by Workplace customers, a huge round of applause filled the room when Kyle and Christine announced that Safety Check is coming to Workplace.
Launched in 2014, Safety Check has already helped millions of people around the world let family and friends know they’re safe in times of crisis. Safety Check will make work communities safer now too, by allowing organizations to locate employees and provide assistance faster.
As Facebook CIO Atish Banerjea explains,
“During times of crisis, people tend to turn to Facebook to get information about their loved ones. It’s been used by millions of people since 2014 when it first launched, and just this year, more than 2,000 crises have been handled through the Safety Check program. It is important to bring this type of product into a work product.”
Find out everything you need to know about Safety Check here.
New Workplace Chat features
1. Multi-company chat
As Christine shared, “Multi-company groups were the first way that we made it easier for people to connect across not only their organization, but with people outside it — your partners, your suppliers, your vendors. Now, we’re building this as part of Workplace Chat as well.”
Multi-company chat is the perfect way for people from different organizations to collaborate in real-time. No more waiting around for a response to that email to a vendor, multi-company chat lets you send quick messages and get instant responses. The best part about it is that you can host video calls at the touch of a button within the chat if you need some face-to-face time with a partner or client.
This means faster decision-making, quicker turnaround time on projects, and the chance to remove those communication barriers between your team and the outside world.
2. Pinned Threads
That said, when you’re working with a lot of people on a project, the conversation can get quite noisy. So we’re also introducing Pinned Threads.
Pinned Threads allow you to pin a conversation to the top of your screen, so you can easily dip in and out of it without losing track of the conversation. You can pin and unpin up to 15 threads, and rearrange them in order of priority by simply dragging and dropping. No matter how many people join a conversation, keeping on top of those fast-moving conversations just got a whole lot easier.
3. Replies
How many times have you stepped away from a group conversation for a while, and by the time you return it’s splintered off in many different directions? The new Replies feature makes it easy to respond to specific messages when conversations like this move fast.
Instead of creating new messages for the different topics you’re discussing with your team, you can keep track of each topic by using replies. Easily follow the flow of conversation on each topic by following its thread.
To learn more about Workplace Chat, check out this article about how to work more effectively with Workplace Chat.
Mark as Important
As companies become more connected and information starts to flow more freely, it’s important for leaders to be able to cut through the noise with important information.
This is why you can now mark a post as important on Workplace to ensure high-signal posts are read. A post that’s marked as important will appear at the top of the News Feed within a group for all members to see. When marking a post as important, you can choose how long you want to pin a post to the top of the group for and if email notifications should be sent, so it’s easy to make sure your posts remain relevant for the right period of time.
We also provide engagement metrics about each important post that deliver a quick overview of how it’s performing. No more throwing that memo over the wall, no more pinning messages to noticeboards and hoping they get read.
Find out more about the new Mark as Important feature here.
Do Not Disturb
We know that working more closely together with your colleagues and external partners is important. But being able to knuckle down and find your flow is essential too. For that reason, there was another big round of applause when Christine announced the new Do Not Disturb feature.
By activating this nifty new feature, you can turn off Workplace and Workplace Chat notifications across desktop and mobile for as long as you need. Get in the zone, find your flow and work undisturbed. Workplace will let your colleagues know that you’ve muted notifications.
These new features reduce the distance between people and teams, and enable everyone to get more work done. In allowing information to flow freely, they make organizations feel smaller and flatter, and allow all employees to play as one team.
Which new features are you most excited to try out?
